Cingular tops in customer complaints
posted March 29th 2005 11:10AM
We've heard complaints about every major carrier in the country (no, we're not going to call up the president of
Sprint and bitch on your behalf), but if you're looking to switch and want something a little more official to base
your decision on than that you heard that your sister's boyfriend's dad's co-worker gets crappy reception near Taco
Bell, Consumers Union (the people behind Consumer Reports) have just published a report based on FCC data
that ranks each of the major US wireless carrier in terms of customer complaints. The big winner/loser? Cingular
(combined with AT&T Wireless), which with 299.8 complaints per million customers managed to have the worst record
of the bunch. Either absorbing AT&T Wireless and its
awful track record must have really hurt their standing or Cingular must be raising the bar on the number of
complaints they'll tolerate, because Verizon Wireless had about one-fourth as many complaints per million
customers.
[Via Mobile Gadget News]
Verizon Wireless, is the best . Cingular stole my money!
Creditor: Cingular Wireless Westregion
Balance: $416.41
This letter is to inform you that I totally dispute these said charges which come from Cingular Wireless. I signed up with Cingular & then I was experiencing areas in Northern California where I could not get a signal. These Areas are called DEAD ZONES. I also experienced time after time Dropped Calls. I could not cope with this cituation anymore because my customers begain complaining. I then started complaining to Cingular about their lousy service. It got to the point that I could not handle it anymore. So I then called to cancell my phone. I got them to wave the $150.00 early termination fee & they told me that I was cancelled. I thought I was finished with Cingular. At this point I never used their phone anymore.
Then after almost 2 1/2 years later I was shocked to receive this letter stating that I owed this money. I then called Cingular & they now reverse what they had told me nearly 2 1/2 years ago. They insist that I never cancelled their service. Instead, they left my phone active & kept billing me monthly charges until their computer automatically cancelled my account for, they say, no payment. I didn't receive a bill from them concerning these charges so I assumed that my cancellatioin was finalized. Then about 2 1/2 years later this collection letter arrives.
I tried to compromise with them but with no positive result. I am willing to pay the $150.00 early termination fee but am not willing to pay the monthly charges charged to my account after I had cancelled. If they check, they will find that there was absoilutely no calls made or received by this phone after I had cancelled.
I want to resolve this matter at once. My credit score is at risk. This is an unjust situation. the cingular people are stubern They do not want to settle this matter. They have given this over to a collection agency who will report negative things about me to the credit bureaus.
Sumation: I had Cingular service but because of lousy service I cancelled. I say that they waved the early termination fee. They say that I never cancelled & kept billing me monthly charges. I say that I neve4r saw a bill until this collection letter arriver almost 2 1/2 years after I thought I had cancelled. I offered to pay Cingular & or the Collection agency the $150.00 early termination fee but both parties refused to accept this offer.
All I wish is to have Cingular accept the $150 Early termination fee I am offering & have their collection agency back off & notify the credit bureaus that I have paid my bill.
Iam concerned that any company can bill cingular wireless with my phone number in hand and make charges without my authorization in writing!!! I've recently become aware that one of my three lines has been charged for downloads(ringtones,games,i.e.)not authorized or received by anyone. Cingular simply passes the charges to the consumer. I am told that I can view what company is billing me through Media Net(a Cingular feature). But to register to Media Net, I need to accept their policy of non responsibility on their part for any errors on Cingular's part. NO!!! I don't want to register on Media Net and later be accused of authorizing anything on MediaNet. Cingular did credit my account the first time I notice the billing(8/03/2005) for the amount of $15.77.I was told to contact Jamster,M Qubed, and M Block to cancel subscriptions and attempt to obtain a refund of charges. All vendors I contacted claimed that they cancelled their services only to show up again on the next months bill.
Cingular reps tell me that I cannot put a block to avoid third party charges although I have had a block on all 3 of my phones to not accept any other media. We do not get these downloads, we only pay for them. I did not sign a contract with Cincular to bill me for a number that was entered into a computer. According to Cingular, you must enter a phone number in the website to activate these charges. LOTS of people have my number! Any number could be entered on these websites and the accompanying sucker must pay them according to Cingular.
I cancelled my account today...all three accounts and have agreed to accept the 150 early term (which will be cheaper in the long run.
What can be done to avoid these 3rd party charges??? Something needs to be done!
Well, I must say that after reading these comments, I see what cingular has been trying to do to me as well. After signing a new contract with At&t less than a year ago, I am having problems recieving calls or voicemail for hours or even a day(s) at a time. After going into the store and calling about 7 times I keep getting the same ole' jargon about how there is nothing they can do, be we can cancel our old contract and we can sign a new two year contract and only then will they replace the 8 month old phones, because there are problems with the towers (but they will continue to bill you even though the service is far from adequate enough to charge). Now given the fact they gave me new phones less than a year ago, it's amazing that they didn't say at the time of renewal that I wouldn't be able to use them in 9 months later, if so I would have continued looking for another carrier. I have spent so many hours on the phone playing ring around the rosie with reps who act as if this is a brand new situation for them, then is was quickly revealed to me that they really don't seem to care about anything but getting new contracts. This is crazy considering the fact that they want to charge me the cancellation fees for both phones on my account even though I am not able to dial out or sometimes recieve call. First, they said they phone needed to be reprogrammed, then when they tried to call it themselves they couldn't get through and said they could not even detect the phone.
This merger has been hell on wheels and they are moving 150mph.
They give NO OPTIONS - NO ADEQUATE RESOLUTIONS and still expect that you would want to sign up with them...Unfortunately the only way I was going to be able to use my phones which I use for business/income, I have to get new phones or go through another painfully elementary and circular conversation....Talk about your corporate Pirates and theives......
I hope this has been of some help to someone.
FILE COMPLAINTS WITH THE FCC, on line and the FTC, onl line also. I was forced into a new 2 yr contract when my AT&T phone fell apart. Even though I had the insurance they said, well there are no AT&T phones available, so you must buy new phones for all of your lines. I spent 300.00 on phones for our family plan. I have now been double billed.
I would be overjoyed at finding a class action lawsuit which is how I found this site, looking for one. If anyone knows of one to sign up put it on here PLEASE! I got a call from the corporate office today 9-16-05 trying to appease me with a 133.00 credit. That still leaves me out of over 350.00. I will take the credit and keep looking for class action law suite. ALl the comments about their rudeness, ripping us off, we NEED a great class action, this is wrong!
Their ad campaign should be get another carrier or it's ALL OVER. I routinely lose about 5 calls per week. It's just hideous and I'm switching.
I have one of the "alleged" flagship phones, the Nokia 8890, and had o.k. service with it for some time when I first acquired it, (the service).
It has since gone to Sh*!, and when I use the automatic service mode (for increased coverage), it will almost CONSISTENTLY drop calls before they are even connected!
I'd just about bet that somehow, I am charged for those "attempted" calls too!
When I select the (non auto mode) for Cingular only, it seems to work better, but can NEVER transfer towers without either dropping a call, or scrambling info!
seems that if the signal is weak, it sucks, if it is "pegged" out at full tilt, IT SUCKS!!!!!!
DAMN THEM TO HELL!
Git' er' DONE!!!!!
I switched cellphone service to Cingular on 9/25/2005 and recieved two copies of Welcome kit on 10/21/05 (That was the first letter received from Cingular ever) and 10/24/05, respectively. On 10/25/05, I received a notice from Cingular stating that my payment of $ 135.12 had not been received and all lines was subject to immediate interuption.
I called Cingular today (10/26/05) and the customer representative Ms. Robinson answered the phone. When I notify her that I had never received the bill from Cingular and the amount showing in the 10/25 notice for me to pay was very different from that stated in the welcome kit. She was totally not cooperative or courtesy. When I asked how I could posssibly pay a bill without receiving it. She just denied completely but she said they sent me the bill on 9/25/05 the very day I open an account with them. When I tried to obtain their FAX number and suggested to fax to her the pages of their welcome kit showing the amount of the monthly charges on the pages. She refused, but asked to me to go to the dealer where I obtained service with.
In addition, I also want to complain about their service of display minutes I used. I never have an exact idea about how many minutes I actually used.
I've had 2 AT&T phones for several years. Prepaid because I'm not a heavy user and $.12/minute was and still is the best prepaid plan out there (better than many monthly plans). Well now my AT&T TDMA phones are no longer manufactured, so I'm going to have to replace them as they start failing. And I'll have to give up my fantastic old rate plan. I was still willing to give Cingular a try, but according to customer service, they won't allow me to transfer my funds from my old phone to a new cingular phone. And my wife (who rarely uses her phone) still has about $100 balance. I'm sure plenty of other people are in the same boat as me.
i was a former cingular customer for 4yrs. i first started out on tdma / analog which was acutally pretty good service. then it came time to renew for 2 more years and i got a GSM phone. my oh my did my cingular nightmare start. gsm has got to be the worst technology ever. especially for rural areas or anywhere that isnt within eye-sight of a large city. to make a long story short it took complaints to the fcc and bbb to finally get rid of cingular. i am now with ALLTEL and fianlly know what its like to have quality cellular service. in my area, alltel cant be beat.
JUST TO LET EVERYONE KNOW... ( INCASE YOU ALREADY DIDNT KNOW) NOT TO TAKE UP FOR CINGULAR WIRELESS OR ANYTHING, BUT THEY ARE GOING TO HAVE MORE COMPLAINTS JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE A BIGGER COMPANY. SINCE WILL TELL YOU THAT. AND YES CINGULAR DOES PICK UP IN RURAL AREAS. I LIVE IN ONE, AND I PICK UP SERVICE FINE.
EUROPE HAS BEEN ON GSM FOR YEARS AND CINGULAR GOING TO GSM WAS ONE OF THE SMARTEST MOVES IN A CELLULAR COMPANY. IN THE FUTURE AS THE COVERAGE GROWS, IT WILL BE CLEARER, CHEAPER, AND YOU WILL BE ABLE TO TRAVEL WITH YOUR PHONES ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.
JUST ONE QUESTION??? WHAT DID YOU PEOPLE DO 20 YEARS AGO WHEN THERE WERE NO SUCH THING AS CELL PHONES????????????? ALSO REMEMBER THIS... IT'S WIRELESS, IT'S NEVER PROMISED!!! ITS ALL UP IN THE AIR!
we in the the cellular business know that gsm works great "where it works". where it works is the problem. coverage is too limited for it to even compare to cdma. gsm, due to its technology, simply cannot cover the same sq. miles as cdma, just as cdma cannot cover the large sq. miles as analog. lets say gsm phones had analog backup, then i think complaints would be much less, as some signal is better than no signal, especially when you really want to make a call.
as for the rural areas, that is much debateable. i also live in a rural area. eastern kentucky rural. i live in the heart of the appalachian mountains, mile high mountains all around me. 40 miles from the neartest large city. granted, cingular tdma/analog worked pretty good, even here. but the gsm simply cannot and does not work as good. it all depends on 1 thing. location, location, location. but for anyone that travels nationwide with a gsm phone, they will tell you. coverage is great next to the cities, and spotty at best once you get off the beaten path.
as far as wireless being promised, we sign a contract for service. cingular is supposed to provide us service, being we pay for it. they should not sell service where it doesnt work. walmart, here in south williamson, ky. sells cingular gsm service, yet there is no coverage whatsoever. not for 30+ miles in any direction. that should not be allowed. that does nothing but make the complaints go up.
as far as 20yrs ago, well at that time i didnt have the service or know of its existance to acutally have a desire / need for it. just like saying what did people do before email or internet. times change and so does our needs. just as it has since moses talked to the burning bush.
I think that is kind of funny that the guy above me does not pick up in eastern, ky. that just so happens to be where I live. I understand that it does not work in all areas, but like I said that is wireless service.
I also am a employee with a wireless company. And incase you didn't already know, Cingular tried the GSM/TDMA phones for 2 years. That just cannot work. You cannot be switching from tower to tower. Your signal will be bouncing everywhere and you will get more dropped calls than ever.
As for GSM not being great in your eyes, I am sorry to hear that and maybe you will change your mind in a few years because you never hear a complaint in Europe and they have had the GSM technology for 15-20 years. Maybe when we have it for 15-20 years, people will understand.
Think of this... No wireless company can control the weather, accidents, or anything to make wireless not work. And when you do sign that contract, it states it is not avaliable in all areas. WITH ANY COMPANY!
NO COMPANY CAN CONTROL WHERE YOU WILL BE OR TRAVEL TO...
Cingular sucks because they have no customer service. I waited six months for a refund on a mis-advertised product and probably would have never recieved the refund if I didn't spend hours and hours hunting it down in the administrative maze and nightmare of Cingular.
Cingular treated me like crap. I complained to the Better Business Bureaus and Cingular had the audacity to say they couldn't get a hold of me. Yeah, like I was calling them every other day to get my refund and they could never track me down. One phrase says it all- liars and cheats.
im not saying they can control the weather. and if you are indeed in eastern kentucky, you must not be in my area. what gets me is, i am listed in the cingular coverage area. yet they simply do not have gsm coverage in a large part of this area. like i said, 30+ miles in any direction of the place where they sell it. cingular has promised towers from south williamson on u.s. 119 all the way north to southridge, wv. for 2yrs now they have promised service, next month, next month. next month has yet to get here. they even have cingular stores in the radio shacks in logan, wv and walmart in south williamson. yet no service anywhere to be found. that is the biggest ripoff i have ever seen. now, as i said before tdma worked fine here. i was able to pick up from the at&t towers and roam from them, even though i was "in cingular coverage area". when i was "forced" to change to gsm, i was completely without service. even though cingular says im covered. lets not even talk about gait fiasco. what a nightmare that was.
which now brings me to my bbb and fcc complaints. cingular finally admitted via letter to me and the bbb that they cannot provide me with service in my area at this time, and there were no plans in the near future to service this area. i was released from my contracts with no penalties.
appalachian wireless by far is the best in eastern kentucky. i have alltel, which roams from appalachian towers. i have never, in the year ive had alltel, been without service. anywhere i have been. im sorry, i cannot say that about cingular.
it really does all depend on where you live and where you use your phone the most. alltel dont have service everywhere, neither does cingular, verizon or anyone else. its all about your location.
by the way, what part of the neighborhood you from? :-)
My Cingular (Orange) nightmare continues even after I thought I had cancelled.
After 9 straight months of double billing problems, 2 hours per month on the phone and hordes of clueless support folks telling me it would never happen again I finally got help. The answer the Blue team came up with was a port to Orange. Ok, so I tried. Blue couldn't port one of my numbers, so I had to let the number go and sign up for new service with Orange. Off I went, happy to be rid of billing problems, soprry to see my old number go. Then the first Orange bill came in the mail. It was screwed up. Month after month, it had the same issues; Plan had been reset, double billing the anchor account, not merging family plan phones together, you get the idea. So I finally decided to bail. I ate the early termination fees gladly just to be rid of the monthly calls with unprofessional and under trained staff, a wholly incompetent billing management system and over a year of headaches.
Thinking I was done (I even took my wife to dinner to celebrate the break), I started getting collection calls. Turns out, one of the departments never got the memo for one of the other departments that the lines had been cancelled so they sent my account to a collection agency to get the payments for a phone that had been cancelled months ago.
The lesson for me here is to never-ever trust what anyone at Cingular has to say. Never trust what anyone at Cingular does. And if I have to deal with them, always triple check everything only do that thing with a supervisor.
Ive been with Verizon for 3 months now. Not one single problem.
i happen to work for cingular and cingular is a great company. A word to the wise folks the cell phone industry is the mostly highly competitive industry there is. as far as the third party vendor i'd suggest you start reading the fine print before you have these alleged "free" ringtones sent to your phones. wise up dumb asses nothing is free. also read the bill we send you every month, read your contract be aware of all services and when 12 year old junior runs up your bill getting free ringtones from 10 different vendors and goes over minutes by 9000 minutes thats your problem not cingulars.
John, employee no. JK6066, refused to honor the cingular warranty. I own 3 motorolla v180 cell phones. Since the purchase of those devices, they have been defective. All three phones shut themselves off and cannot be restarted without first removing the battery. My warranty from cingular promises that the company will replace defective devices. John recognized that all three cell phones are defective and must be replaced. John violated my warranty by claiming that the warranty's "like kind" provision prevents cingular from replacing the defective motorolla v180 cell phones. Instead, according to john, cingular can only send me three motorolla v180 phones to replace the v180's I already own. That suggestion is ridiculous and clearly violates my rights under the cingular warranty. The motorolla v180 is a piece of junk. That junk status is documented on the internet, just run "motorolla v180" on phonescoop.com. Moreover, all three of my v180 have identical problems. Additionally, my mother's v180 has the same material defects as do my phones and as noted on phonescoop.com and other web sites. Finally, I am entitled to a $30.00 rebate for each v180. To date, I have not received my $90.00 in rebates.
I am also a victim of the cingular and att merger. I have been with att 5 years with no problems. Now I have cingular and I need a new phone I am being told constanly you have to sign a new 2 year contract and also sign up for a new rate plan even though my phone is having severe problems. I have a att plan 1000 minutes free nights and weekend for 29.99 have had that plan for 5 years now who can compare to that no one. I understand that wireless services will change frequently but it seems as if cingular is not concerned with att customers, who by the way are your new customers.
I was blatantly lied to by a Cingular Solutions representative when I complained that since AT&T had merged with Cingular, AT&T customers had received NO service, only a new address to mail their checks to. We are denied all Cingular promotions, special plans, etc. and are told we must get NEW phones to have the same services as pre-existing Cingular customers and are treated as stepchildren. They would not give me a phone comparable to the fantastic Nokia 6800 which has a keyboard and built-in camera and video,purchased in good faith from AT&T. I told them I was just waiting for my contract to be up, so could go with another company. I was then contacted by a guy in SOLUTIONS who promised to send me a Samsung D307 and told it had ALL the features of the Nokia 6800, in exchange for getting a new 2 yr plan with Cingular. I specifically asked if it had keyboard, camera, and video and he responded that, yes, it did. Based on his information, I agreed on a new contract with Cingular. Afterwards,I looked up the phone on the internet and it does NOT have either a camera or video capacity. So, I was blatantly lied to by Cingular's Solutions rep. I refuse to be an AT&T step-child one minute longer than necessary. I immediately cancelled the 'new' two-yr contract and will not accept the new phone when it arrives. I see a real ethics problems here!!!!!! I will drop this company the day my old AT&T contract expires, even if it means paying for another phone from a new company, as a matter of principal.
We are also ex AT@T customers and again step childen as far as Cingular is concerned! How many customers do they have to lose before they get it!
We wish to order the Razr - Cingular wants me to sign up for two years - not going to happen! If not we have to pay $300.00 for a phone they sell for $90.00 with a two year contract. This phone is available on the web for $225.00 (unlocked).This is restrictive and defies the spirit of the merger. Please someone start a class action only then will they get it. I will not be renewing with Cingular, nor my spouse nor my family members. I teach customer service and to hear one of their own employees call us the poor maligned customers "dumb asses" appears to be part of their problem!
Cingular Customers Beware! when bills started coming in high I investigated my bills to find that I was being charged for calls between 7 and 9 PM. I have a signed contract that clearly states that I am on the 7 PM to 7 AM free minutes plan. When I called customer service i was switched back and forth to different representitives. Finally after days of calling and waiting for a supervisor, she told me that I wasn't on that plan. I sent a copy of the contract and then she said that I should have been on the 7 to 7 plan but I waited too long to find the error and my phone service will be cut off if I didn't pay a surprise bill of nearly 1200.00. my phone service was cut off and I was charged $150 for each of three phones as a penalty. The case is in the process of closing with cingular having to credit more than $800 to my account. I had to open another account with a other provider.